How Being Healthy Can Save You Millions

In the next few minutes, you'll learn how to save hundreds of thousands and potentially millions of dollars.

Do I have your attention? Good.

Being sick is brutal. If you have something minor like a cold, your symptoms make life uncomfortable. If you have something serious like heart disease, your symptoms force you to change your entire lifestyle. Not only do treating these diseases require a lot of energy and time, but they also require a lot of money. A relatively benign sickness like type II diabetes carries a lifetime cost of up to $130K. More aggressive illnesses like heart disease cost an average $420Kbut can cost as much as $5M. Even something as brief as a heart attack costs $20Kjust for the ER trip.

Aside from being unbelievably expensive, these conditions have something else in common — they’re avoidable. That's right, you get to choose. With preventable illnesses, you can reduce your risk of getting seriously sick with just a few simple interventions that we know work.

Now sometimes genes or other uncontrollable factors will still lead to illness and there's nothing you can do about that. But for the vast majority, that's not the case and you are in control of your own health. So let's focus on what you can do to steer yourself away from illness, pain, and massive expense and towards health, happiness, and financial security.

You ready? It’s a really long list. Here’s how to save an enormous amount of money:

move your body

eat quality food

Now, we all know that “simple” does not equal “easy”. This isn’t meant to be a “draw the rest of the owl” post. In a world where busy is the norm, taking care of your body can often feel like an unnecessary chore. Shelling out for healthy food and a gym membership can feel prohibitively expensive, especially if you're living on a budget.

Do you know what’s more expensive than a gym membership? A heart attack. If you’re living on a budget it’s even more important to invest in your health. The less money you have in the bank, the less you can afford a debilitating illness. Your health is an investment you can’t afford not to make.

A basic gym membership runs around $20/month and buying healthy food costs around $45/month more than buying unhealthy food. That's $65/month to significantly reduce your chance of dying. Still too much? Cut the gym membership. Running, burpees, planks, and pushups are all free and there are hundreds of free, bodyweight workouts online. That leaves you at $45/month. That's $1.50/day. For less than the price of anything at Starbucks, you can reduce your risk of dying by as much as 77%.

Just to really hammer the point home, here’s a comparison graph of what it costs to be ill vs what it costs to prevent illness.

Those bars all represent lifetime cost. You don't have to have an advanced degree to see which lifestyle leads to a healthier body and wallet.